"What motivates you to be a Cypress Ambassador?
Firstly, it's the love for this tool and how it has made my life better as an engineer. This should most definitely be a pathway for me to involve in a deeper way with the community as well as to learn, contribute, and empower many more folks with this powerful tool, which is set forth to transform how we test modern-day web apps.
How do you currently help others who are either using Cypress or interested in using Cypress?
I train people getting started with Cypress, help debug tests, resolve issues, and am involved in designing the framework and laying out best practices.
What is your favorite Cypress feature?
The wholesome development experience is at the top of the list. This experience really feels like a generational shift from what we were used to with Selenium-based tests. This significantly took away the pain points we had, for instance, wait management, element state management, flakiness, retry ability, better debuggability, to name a few. And with top-notch documentation, it just feels like the cherry on top of the cake!
What is your favorite "Cypress Best Practice" and why?
The foremost has to be the Page Object Model. I feel this is the quintessential design of any framework, and Cypress is no exception here. And the best part is, even though Cypress comes in with a well-designed framework experience, it does a great job by providing you with all the bridges needed to customize the framework to the user's liking. A few notable things would be custom plugins, commands, hooks, tasks, etc., which cater to a wide array of applications like report customization to adding customized functionality to enhance the framework even more.
Outside of work, what are your favorite things to do (hobbies, passions, etc.)?
Photography, playing various sports, meditating.
What is one professional milestone you are proud of? (an accomplishment, celebration, recognition, etc.)
Right from an early age, I have thoroughly enjoyed fixing broken things. Like when I was about 10 years old, I fixed our television soldering using wax from the candle. I swear I knew nothing about electronics :P, I suppose that trait still lives on in some way. In a more contextual example, I was able to identify the root cause of a peculiar and random yet a blocking memory leak issue which was causing the Cypress renderer process to crash and halted the entire testing team from using Cypress for about two weeks. We identified the issue because of a change introduced in one of the packages that we were using (Cypress-terminal-report v5.3.2). In this process, we learned more about browser memory management, how to read memory stats, and we identified a best practice that is to never put your packages to auto-update mode and always update packages individually after a fair amount of testing.
For new users - what is the best way to "get started" with Cypress?
I would say if you know a bit of JavaScript & some automation, a visit to docs.cypress.io has got you covered. You really do not need any further resources to get started. You get a fairly great and clean framework in place on day zero. And of course, the documentation is of top-notch quality.
What is your favorite quote or saying?
Do not over-automate. Let me elaborate a bit, Don't be focused on the volume of automation but be obsessed with the minimum tests which can validate the maximum amount of functionality. Augment redundant UI actions, setups, and teardowns always with more efficient API calls rather than relying solely on UI. Also, it could be a game-changer if development & testing can go hand in hand!
About the Ambassador Program.
The Cypress Ambassador program supports the top Cypress advocates around the world. Through this program, Ambassadors are offered speaking opportunities, a personalized hub, and visibility within our extensive network.To learn more about these wonderful ambassadors visit our Official Ambassador webpage.
The Cypress Community Team has been working on the official Cypress Ambassador program to include a variety of new experiences, support resources, benefits, contribution areas, and much more. One of our main priorities is to highlight our current Ambassadors and the amazing work they are doing. They truly embody the community spirit through their advocacy to help empower others. We will be having more opportunities to connect with our Ambassadors this year. Make sure to stay updated and connect with the community.